What Problem Did WhatsApp Solve?

They solved two big challenges – non-email UserId especially in non-English speaking world that was not trained by AOL and E-Mail (What is it? How do I remember it?) and expensive SMS.

Username is a “first world” construct, Numbers are universal: Imagine you are semi-literate and live in a small town in India or Nigeria and have never used the internet. You don’t even know what a userid is. All apps used to require creating and using a userid. Whatsapp uses the phone number as the id. In fact, co-founder Koum says this aloud in terms of his personal experience of finding it difficult to remember his Skype user name and password. See Inside The Facebook-WhatsApp Megadeal: The Courtship, The Secret Meetings, The $19 Billion Poker Game

Key Insight – In developing countries like India and China, most people got a personal cell phone number before they ever got an email address. This is not what happened in the US. We all had email first. So our natural id is email, while theirs is cell phone number. Plus email id is really hard to do for people that don’t speak English fluently (like many Indians).

SMS: Telcos got hooked on high per text rates especially in India, and teens loved texting. So they went looking for a cheap “unlimited” SMS. Whatsapp solved that and more.

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